COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 27 



We are really astonished at the infatuation for the opinions 

 of Descartes which took possession of Germany during the 

 latter half of the seventeenth century. They were pushed to 

 the extreme point, soul, reason, and intellect were denied to 

 all animals. A person named Stahl,* who had at least the 

 merit of being consistent to the last, brings forward a principle, 

 that animals do not feel, bruta non sentire. This announce- 

 ment is the conclusion of a very learned syllogism, and which 

 one Glaspard Laugenhert had added to the Compendium Phy- 

 sicce of Arnold Geulinx. 



It is with much trouble that some strong minds have dared 

 to raise their voices in this Cartesian concert, having taken 

 good care to strengthen themselves by plenty of quotations 

 gathered from the Old and New Testament s.f These were 

 then proofs positive, and at times it was prudent to use them. 

 The side of the animals has been successively strengthened by 

 Buffon, and indeed by everybody. At the present day, M. 

 Flourens refuses them thought alone, " this supreme faculty 

 which the mind of man possesses, so that it may rely upon 

 itself, and study its own mind.J There is here," says the 

 physiologist of whom we are speaking, " a strong line of de- 

 marcation ; this thought which can reason about itself, this 

 intellect which beholds and studies itself, this knowledge 

 which is acquainted with itself, evidently forms an order of 

 determined phenomena of a clearly defined nature, and to 

 which no animal would know how to attain. There is a purely 

 intellectual world, if we may say so, and this world belongs only 

 to man. In one word, animals feel, understand, think ; but man 



* Logicce Brutorum, Hamburg, 1697. This little treatise, in spite of the 

 extreme ideas of its author, is not the less precious. J. Stahl was one of 

 those wells of learning which Germany has so often produced. There is, 

 perhaps, not one passage in the old authors who wrote on this point to which 

 he has not referred in his work. 



f See, among others, S. Gros, De Animd Brutorum, Wittemberg, 1680; 

 Klemnius, De Animd Brutorum, Vittembergise, 1704. 



$ Upon this point, M. de Quatrefages agrees with M. Flourens ; but the 

 distinction which he endeavours to establish, being based upon morality and 

 religion, seems to us much more restricted and much less clear. Not being 

 able to answer everybody, we have been obliged to attend merely to the 

 opinions of that partisan of the Iranian kingdom who gives to animals the 

 largest portion of it. 



